This Uber ruling doesn’t understand the modern way of working

Forgive me if you’ve never experienced the delights of Uber, but this little app has changed my life. Once I thought of taxis as expensive, only to be taken to the airport for early flights. Now I take them everywhere.

Why? Through Uber, taxis are cheap, certainly compared to black cabs. And rather than arrange a minicab in advance, I can book an Uber last minute with a few clicks on my mobile. It’s paid for automatically by credit card, there’s no need to risk a night bus, and you often get excellent conversation. I was once driven home by a Kosovan who had been stranded in London while on holiday as the Kosovo war broke out; he never left. We set the world to rights and I arrived home safely for under a tenner.

Not every driver is as charming. But the ability to rate their performance keeps standards high and, on the few occasions I’ve had a complaint, tapping feedback into my phone brought an immediate response. I even have my own rating – 4.6 out of five, which, apparently, isn’t very good.

After an employment tribunal judgment on Friday, much of this is under threat. Egged on by the GMB union, two drivers argued they are not self-employed but workers and are owed a host of associated benefits.

The implications (barring an appeal) are terrible, not least for drivers – 76 per cent of whom say they prefer the current arrangements. Instead of working when they wish, and earning, on average, £12 per hour after costs (well above the National Living Wage), the requirement that Uber pays a minimum salary, regardless of whether drivers pick up passengers, will likely mean restrictions on how they can operate. They will no doubt have to pay higher commission too, if Uber is required to fund holiday pay.

Consumers will feel the pain. If people are put off becoming an Uber driver, its infamous surge pricing (where rides become dearer when demand exceeds supply) will become more common. It’s a toxic mix for those who prize Uber’s flexibility, affordability and convenience.

This sabotage against the “gig economy” is part of a wider trend: selfemployment has become a bogeyman for the Left. During the post-financialcrisis downturn, when the selfemployed percentage of the workforce rose sharply, commentators decried this as evidence of the precariousness of our new economy – people acting in desperation as cynical companies outsourced work once done by fulltime staff. Such an interpretation fits the view of those who think that without a paternalistic employer, we are bereft children. But the facts speak otherwise.

For one thing, self-employed people, even on low incomes, have higher job satisfaction than full-time employees, according to the think tank Bright Blue. Most are not seeking employee status, instead preferring the flexibility that comes with working for themselves. From Uber to home rental platform Airbnb, digital services have made it easy to make money in your spare time or from assets that would otherwise be unused. For many of my twentysomething peers, selfemployment or freelancing is a way of topping up our incomes, or even a route into a new full-time job.

True, the self-employed may not be raking it in – the Resolution Foundation says typical weekly earnings have fallen £60 in real terms since 2001-02. But with a Citizens Advice poll finding that 41 per cent of people would ideally like to work for themselves, we should be making it easier for them to do so, not harder.

The Uber judgment highlights two further risks. First, Britain’s flexible labour rules may be moving in the wrong direction. The government has appointed former Labour adviser Matthew Taylor to review employment regulation, and ministers’ comments suggest they look forward to him presenting a suite of new workers’ “rights”. Let us hope that, instead, he finds a way of revising Britain’s labour laws for a digital age, while also examining the negative impact of taxes like stamp duty on people’s ability to move around for work.

Second, lumping obligations onto firms like Uber may make them dispense with humans entirely. Uber has been experimenting with driverless cars. Just as high labour costs contributed to the proliferation of selfservice supermarket checkouts, so forcing Uber to pay workers’ benefits to drivers may prompt it to accelerate its driverless plans. When the joy of Uber is as much about meeting people like my friendly Kosovan as its low cost and flexibility, that would be a tragedy.